lost than gained by the substitution of the rigidly-defined and ever-repeated idealisms of a distorted superstition for the
living impersonations of the truth of human passion.
But I digress.—The connection of scenic exhibitions with the improvement or corruption of the manners of men has been
universally recognized; in other words, the presence or absence of poetry in its most perfect and universal form has been
found to be connected with good and evil in conduct or habit. The corruption which has been imputed to the drama as an
effect, begins when the poetry employed in its constitution ends: I appeal to the history of manners whether the periods
of the growth of the one and the decline of the other have not corresponded with an exactness equal to any example of
moral cause and effect.
The drama at Athens, or wheresoever else it may have approached to its perfection, ever coexisted with the moral and
intellectual greatness of the age. The tragedies of the Athenian poets are as mirrors in which the spectator beholds
himself, under a thin disguise of circumstance, stript of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to
be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become. The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with
pains and passions so mighty that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the
good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the
satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life: even crime is disarmed of half its horror and all its
contagion by being represented as the fatal consequence of the unfathomable agencies of nature; error is thus divested
of its willfulness; men can no longer cherish it as the creation of their choice. In a drama of the highest order there is little
food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect. Neither the eye nor the mind can see itself,
unless reflected upon that which it resembles. The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is as a prismatic and
many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity
of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it
with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall.
But in periods of the decay of social life, the drama sympathizes with that decay. Tragedy becomes a cold imitation of the
form of the great masterpieces of antiquity, divested of all harmonious accompaniment of the kindred arts; and often the
very form misunderstood, or a weak attempt to teach certain doctrines, which the writer considers as moral truths; and
which are usually no more than specious flatteries of some gross vice or weakness with which the author, in common
with his auditors, are infected. Hence what has been called the classical and domestic drama. Addison's
Cato
is a
specimen of the one; and would it were not superfluous to cite examples of the other! To such purposes poetry cannot
be made subservient. Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain
it.
And thus we observe that all dramatic writings of this nature are unimaginative in a singular degree; they affect sentiment
and passion, which, divested of imagination, are other names for caprice and appetite. The period in our own history of
the grossest degradation of the drama is the reign of Charles II., when all forms in which poetry had been accustomed to
be expressed became hymns to the triumph of kingly power over liberty and virtue. Milton stood alone illuminating an age
unworthy of him. At such periods the calculating principle pervades all the forms of dramatic exhibition, and poetry
ceases to be expressed upon them. Comedy loses its ideal universality: wit succeeds to humour; we laugh from self-
complacency and triumph, instead of pleasure; malignity, sarcasm, and contempt succeed to sympathetic merriment; we
hardly laugh, but we smile. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, becomes, from the very
veil which it assumes, more active if less disgusting: it is a monster for which the corruption of society for ever brings
forth new food, which it devours in secret.
The drama being that form under which a greater number of modes of expression of poetry are susceptible of being
combined than any other, the connection of poetry and social good is more observable in the drama than in whatever
other form. And it is indisputable that the highest perfection of human society has ever corresponded with the highest
dramatic excellence; and that the corruption or the extinction of the drama in a nation where it has once flourished, is a
mark of a corruption of manners, and an extinction of the energies which sustain the soul of social life. But, as
Machiavelli says of political institutions, that life may be preserved and renewed, if men should arise capable of bringing
back the drama to its principles. And this is true with respect to poetry in its most extended sense: all language, institution
and form, require not only to be produced, but to be sustained: the office and character of a poet participates in the
divine nature as regards providence, no less than as regards creation.
Civil war, the spoils of Asia, and the fatal predominance, first of the Macedonian, and then of the Roman arms, were so
many symbols of the extinction or suspension of the creative faculty in Greece. The bucolic writers, who found patronage
under the lettered tyrants of Sicily and Egypt, were the latest representatives of its most glorious reign. Their poetry is
intensely melodious; like the odour of the tuberose, it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness; whilst
the poetry of the preceding age was as a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the
field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its
extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and
the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the
poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. An equal sensibility to
the influence of the senses and the affections is to be found in the writings of Homer and Sophocles: the former,
especially, has clothed sensual and pathetic images with irresistible attractions. Their superiority over these succeeding
writers consists in the presence of those thoughts which belong to the inner faculties of our nature, not in the absence of
those which are connected with the external: their incomparable perfection consists in a harmony of the union of all. It is
not what the erotic poets have, but what they have not, in which their imperfection consists. It is not inasmuch as they
were poets, but inasmuch as they were not poets, that they can be considered with any plausibility as connected with the
corruption of their age. Had that corruption availed so as to extinguish in them the sensibility to pleasure, passion, and
natural scenery, which is imputed to them as an imperfection, the last triumph of evil would have been achieved.
For the end of social corruption is to destroy all sensibility to pleasure; and, therefore, it is corruption. It begins at the
imagination and the intellect as at the core, and distributes itself thence as a paralysing venom, through the affections
into the very appetites, until all become a torpid mass in which hardly sense survives. At the approach of such a period,
poetry ever addresses itself to those faculties which are the last to be destroyed, and its voice is heard, like the footsteps
of Astraa, departing from the world. Poetry ever communicates all the pleasure which men are capable of receiving: it is
ever still the light of life; the source of whatever of beautiful or generous or true can have place in an evil time. It will
readily be confessed that those among the luxurious citizens of Syracuse and Alexandria, who were delighted with the
poems of Theocritus, were less cold, cruel, and sensual than the remnant of their tribe. But corruption must utterly have
destroyed the fabric of human society before poetry can ever cease. The sacred links of that chain have never been
entirely disjointed, which descending through the minds of many men is attached to those great minds, whence as from a
magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty
which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation. And let us not circumscribe the effects
of the bucolic and erotic poetry within the limits of the sensibility of those to whom it was addressed. They may have
perceived the beauty of those immortal compositions, simply as fragments and isolated portions: those who are more
finely organized, or, born in a happier age, may recognize them as episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the
co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.
The same revolutions within a narrower sphere had place in ancient Rome; but the actions and forms of its social life
never seem to have been perfectly saturated with the poetical element. The Romans appear to have considered the
Greeks as the selectest treasuries of the selectest forms of manners and of nature, and to have abstained from creating
in measured language, sculpture, music, or architecture anything which might bear a particular relation to their own
condition, whilst it should bear a general one to the universal constitution of the world. But we judge from partial
evidence, and we judge perhaps partially. Ennius, Varro, Pacuvius, and Accius, all great poets, have been lost. Lucretius
is in the highest, and Virgil in a very high sense, a creator. The chosen delicacy of expressions of the latter are as a mist
of light which conceal from us the intense and exceeding truth of his conceptions of nature. Livy is instinct with poetry.
Yet Horace, Catullus, Ovid, and generally the other great writers of the Virgilian age, saw man and nature in the mirror of
Greece. The institutions also, and the religion of Rome, were less poetical than those of Greece, as the shadow is less
vivid than the substance. Hence poetry in Rome seemed to follow, rather than accompany, the perfection of political and
domestic society. The true poetry of Rome lived in its institutions; for whatever of beautiful, true, and majestic they
contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus, the
death of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their godlike state, of the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the
republic to make peace with Hannibal after the battle of Cannae, were not the consequences of a refined calculation of
the probable personal advantage to result from such a rhythm and order in the shows of life, to those who were at once
the poets and the actors of these immortal dramas. The imagination, beholding the beauty of this order, created it out of
itself according to its own idea; the consequence was empire, and the reward ever-living fame. These things are not the
less poetry,
quia carent vate sacro
.
They are the episodes of that cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. The Past, like an inspired
rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with their harmony.
At length the ancient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolutions. And the world would have
fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric
systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the
imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. It is foreign to the present purpose
to touch upon the evil produced by these systems: except that we protest, on the ground of the principles already
established, that no portion of it can be attributed to the poetry they contain.
It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of
Jesus and his disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers of this extraordinary person are all
instinct with the most vivid poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a certain period after the
prevalence of a system of opinions founded upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and became the object of the worship of the civilized
world. Here it is to be confessed that "Light seems to thicken", and "The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse".
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a
resurrection, balancing itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its yet unwearied flight into
the heaven of time. Listen to the music, unheard by outward ears, which is as a ceaseless and invisible wind, nourishing
its everlasting course with strength and swiftness.
The poetry in the doctrines of Jesus Christ, and the mythology and institutions of the Celtic [Footnote: The confusion
between Celtic and Teutonic is constant in the writers of the eighteenth century and the early part of this.] conquerors of
the Roman empire, outlived the darkness and the convulsions connected with their growth and victory, and blended
themselves in a new fabric of manners and opinion. It is an error to impute the ignorance of the dark ages to the Christian
doctrines or the predominance of the Celtic nations. Whatever of evil their agencies may have contained sprang from the
extinction of the poetical principle, connected with the progress of despotism and superstition. Men, from causes too
intricate to be here discussed, had become insensible and selfish: their own will had become feeble, and yet they were
its slaves, and thence the slaves of the will of others: lust, fear, avarice, cruelty, and fraud characterized a race amongst
whom no one was to be found capable of creating in form, language, or institution. The moral anomalies of such a state
of society are not justly to be charged upon any class of events immediately connected with them, and those events are
most entitled to our approbation which could dissolve it most expeditiously. It is unfortunate for those who cannot
distinguish words from thoughts, that many of these anomalies have been incorporated into our popular religion.
It was not until the eleventh century that the effects of the poetry of the Christian and chivalric systems began to manifest
themselves.
The principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his Republic, as the theoretical rule of the mode in
which the materials of pleasure and of power produced by the common skill and labour of human beings ought to be
distributed among them. The limitations of this rule were asserted by him to be determined only by the sensibility of each,
or the utility to result to all. Plato, following the doctrines of Timaeus and Pythagoras, taught also a moral and intellectual
system of doctrine, comprehending at once the past, the present, and the future condition of man. Jesus Christ divulged
the sacred and eternal truths contained in these views to mankind, and Christianity, in its abstract purity, became the
exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity. The incorporation of the Celtic nations
with the exhausted population of the south, impressed upon it the figure of the poetry existing in their mythology and
institutions. The result was a sum of the action and reaction of all the causes included in it; for it may be assumed as a
maxim that no nation or religion can supersede any other without incorporating into itself a portion of that which it
supersedes. The abolition of personal and domestic slavery, and the emancipation of women from a great part of the
degrading restraints of antiquity, were among the consequences of these events.
The abolition of personal slavery is the basis of the highest political hope that it can enter into the mind of man to
conceive. The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship
were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had
walked forth among their worshippers; so that earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. The familiar
appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly, and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of
Eden. And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of their art:
Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse
. The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors, preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as
spells, which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of love. It is impossible to feel
them without becoming a portion of that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain how the gentleness
and the elevation of mind connected with these sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and
wise, and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self. Dante understood the secret things of love even more
than Petrarch. His
Vita Nuova
is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment and language: it is the idealized history
of that period, and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and
the gradations of his own love and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended to the throne
of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the
judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the Divine Drama, in the measure of the admiration which they
accord to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a
worthy poet in Plato alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest writers of the renovated
world; and the music has penetrated the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers
of our own age, have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies in the human mind of that sublimest
victory over sensuality and force.
The true relation borne to each other by the sexes into which human kind is distributed has become less misunderstood;
and if the error which confounded diversity with inequality of the powers of the two sexes has been partially recognized in
the opinions and institutions of modern Europe, we owe this great benefit to the worship of which chivalry was the law,
and poets the prophets.
The poetry of Dante may be considered as the bridge thrown over the stream of time, which unites the modern and
ancient world. The distorted notions of invisible things which Dante and his rival Milton have idealized are merely the
mask and the mantle in which these great poets walk through eternity enveloped and disguised. It is a difficult question to
determine how far they were conscious of the distinction which must have subsisted in their minds between their own
creeds and that of the people. Dante at least appears to wish to mark the full extent of it by placing Rhipaus, whom Virgil
calls
justissimus unus
, in Paradise, [Footnote:
Paradiso, xx
. 68.] and observing a most heretical caprice in his
distribution of rewards and punishments. And Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that
system, of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support. Nothing can exceed the
energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in
Paradise Lost
.
It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Implacable hate,
patient cunning, and a sleepless refinement of device to inflict the extremest anguish on an enemy, these things are evil;
and, although venial in a slave, are not to be forgiven in a tyrant; although redeemed by much that ennobles his defeat in
one subdued, are marked by all that dishonours his conquest in the victor. Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far
superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity
and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not
from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of
exasperating him to deserve new torments. Milton has so far violated the popular creed (if this shall be judged to be a
violation) as to have alleged no superiority of moral virtue to his God over his Devil.
And this bold neglect of a direct moral purpose is the most decisive proof of the supremacy of Milton's genius. He
mingled, as it were, the elements of human nature as colours upon a single pallet, and arranged them in the composition
of his great picture according to the laws of epic truth; that is, according to the laws of that principle by which a series of
actions of the external universe and of intelligent and ethical beings is calculated to excite the sympathy of succeeding
generations of mankind. The
Divina Commedia
and
Paradise Lost
have conferred upon modern mythology a systematic
form; and when change and time shall have added one more superstition to the mass of those which have arisen and
decayed upon the earth, commentators will be learnedly employed in elucidating the religion of ancestral Europe, only
not utterly forgotten because it will have been stamped with the eternity of genius.
Homer was the first and Dante the second epic poet: that is, the second poet, the series of whose creations bore a
defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived, and of the ages
which followed it, developing itself in correspondence with their development. For Lucretius had limed the wings of his
swift spirit in the dregs of the sensible world; and Virgil, with a modesty that ill became his genius, had affected the fame
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